Julia Mahoney of Bloom interviewed me last week. Audio excerpts from that interview are on the Bloom website now. KFTC, lands unsuitable for mining petitions, Mad magazine, the fourth wall, Radio Raheem, and WMMT-FM are discussed. A reading from the novel Trampoline which ends in our heroine Dawn Jewell passed out facedown in her high school parking lot is also included. Thank you to Julia Mahoney and the good people at Bloom.

The Millions pointed me to Big, Bent Ears a documentary project by Rock Fish Stew proprietors Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss. Please watch the video at the end of the prologue where Ricky Moore, chef at the Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, NC explains how to handle a fish, make rockfish stew, and live life right. I bet I watch this video a hundred times.

"Gun" by Scout Niblett has been on the Trampoline writing soundtrack ever since I heard it. It has a very Dawn Jewell attitude, although I can't imagine Dawn ever shooting her man Willett. Well, I can't imagine her making a music video about it. Hot inflatable guitar solo here.

Here's what Lisa Peet, Associate Editor of News & Features for Library Journal, says about Trampoline on the Library Journal website:"There are the books you like, and the books you love, and then there are the ones you want to hold to your heart for a minute after you turn the last page. Robert Gipe’s illustrated novel Trampoline (Ohio Univ.) is one of those—not just well written, which it is; and not just visually appealing, which the wonderfully deadpan black-and-white drawings make sure of; but there is something deeply lovable about it, an undertow of affection you couldn’t fight if you wanted to. Or I couldn’t, anyway. Coming-of-age stories are supposed to do that, aren’t they?—make you love their young heroes or heroines, no matter how difficult they might be. And most, I find, don’t. But Gipe has done it with 15-year-old Dawn Jewell, growing up at the end of the Nineties in a poor Kentucky mining town with a sprawling (in more ways than one) dysfunctional family, as well as loyal and not-so-loyal friends, drugs and moonshine, strip mining activism, car wrecks, Black Flag on the radio, and a sympathetic DJ. And Gipe deftly avoids every single cliché that could trip such a story up, which includes having a pitch-perfect ear for dialect and making it into something marvelous. There are arrests, fights, bad reputations—”When they showed up, it was like it started raining washing machines. Things got broke.”—and fierce scraps of beauty pulled from anywhere Dawn can find them. Trampoline is a wonder. It’s not out until April, but you can catch a couple of chapters on the publisher’s website."